The
Bald and the Beautiful: Shaven-headed Women
in Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) and The Pesthouse (2007)

Shaven-headed
women recur in Jim Crace’s fiction, functioning as extreme and powerful images,
from the rebellious (yet ultimately sympathetic) character of Syl in Being Dead (1999) to the newly
self-sufficient (though socially ostracized) Margaret in The Pesthouse (2007), the figure is imbued with a complex set of
symbolic readings, that are intended to imply the character’s strength and
vulnerability at the same time.The
sense of human frailty that the figure evokes reflects broader cultural
incarnations of the shaven-headed figure which traces its genesis to early
narrative forms but perhaps reaches its peak within post-World War II cinema;
Crace locates his own early encounters with the shaven-headed female figure in
such films, whilst also hinting at the importance of the Second World War for
contemporary readings of the figure:

My first shaven
encounters in film and fiction were with Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls (played not quite so baldly by Ingrid
Bergmann in the movie) and Jean Seberg in Saint
Joan and Godard’s A Bout de Souffle.
Then there is the bald-headed Sinead O'Connor heroically resisting the boos at
the Dylan tribute concert. A startling, moving bit of film which would not have
been so eloquent had she sported locks down to her shoulders. But most of all,
there are the twinning but contrasting images of shaven Jewish women in
concentration camps, and the revenge shaving and tarring of female
collaborators by righteous Parisian mobs in 1945 (interview with author
02/09/08).

In the quote above
Crace evokes a cultural sense of such well-recognized traumas as the Russian
Gulags and the Nazi Holocaust where such images have proliferated even in popular
culture[i]
as a sign of utter abjection and vulnerability.

However, in Crace’s fiction there may be traced other dimensions,
for such a figure can serve to externalize trauma of many kinds whilst also subverting
hegemonic depictions of the feminine, a strategy undertaken, as this article suggests,
in order to allow such depictions and yet in a fashion that disassociates the
narrative’s viewpoint from traditional patriarchal constructs of gender as
identified by Simone de Beauvoir[ii].
For Beauvoir the process of becoming a
woman (and thus becoming a subjugated ‘Other’) entails the acceptance of
certain modes of behavior and dress (including ways of dressing hair) which are
prescribed as being ‘feminine’. Thus, by removing the hair of his female
protagonists Crace perhaps utilizes a far less overtly feminine image which
allows the female characters to serve as more universal, less gender-specific
points of identification, whilst the associations of hairlessness and suffering
allows them to sustain a sense of common human frailty.

Crace’s use of the symbol of the shaven head and the loss of hair
forms part of a long aesthetic tradition. Head hair fulfills an emblematic
purpose in fiction that can be traced back to the earliest narrative forms and
which still persists in the contemporary period.At a cursory level, the image appears
straight-forward in its symbolic function.From biblical figures such as Samson, to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid (1837) to
contemporary incarnations in visual media, such as the characters of Ripley in Alien3, (1992) Evey in V for
Vendetta (2006) and Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s eponymous heroine Tank Girl (1988- 1995); the deliberate
removal of head hair provides a physical incarnation of trauma and/or
sacrifice.Perhaps the most documented
tale that involves the loss of female hair of the modern era is Hans Christian
Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. Andersen's
fairy tale features a young mermaid who willingly chooses to marry a human
prince and thus have a mortal soul like humans.

When the prince does not marry the mermaid, but chooses someone
else, the mermaid will supposedly become foam on the water the morning after
the marriage. A few hours after his wedding, the mermaid’s sisters appear,
having sacrificed their hair to give her a magical knife which, if plunged into
the prince's heart before dawn, will prevent her death and return her 300 years
of life.In this story, the depiction of
the shaving of the female head or cropping of hair allows Anderson to embark
upon a process of actualizing a complex set of responses to the trauma that the
character has internalized.The sisters
surrender their hair in an act which is at the same time sacrificial and yet
also liberating since it allows the mermaids to take back their sister and to
defeat the duplicitous humans who have done them wrong.This article will argue that the shaven-headed
female protagonist in Crace’s work fulfils a similar dualistic function in that
the image serves to externalize trauma whilst also subverting hegemonic
depictions of the feminine, and ultimately is both a sacrificial and yet also
liberating act; allowing for a degree of female autonomy in the often heavily
patriarchal systems that Crace’s novels depict and critique.

Evidence of such heavily patriarchal systems in the world outside of
the text can be found even in modern times as evidenced by the fact that a
shaven-headed woman draws much more attention and discussion than a bald male. Patrick Barkham reports on the phenomena for
the Guardian, in an article that was
inspired by the reaction to Britney Spears’s decision to shave her head.Barkham acknowledges that:

Throughout
history, a shorn head has been heavy with meaning. The bare-headed Christian or
Buddhist monks told of their devotion or a renunciation of worldly pleasures.
More commonly, shaven heads have been associated with trauma, brutality and the
loss of individuality or strength. In biblical legend, Samson was deprived of
his incredible power and killed when his hair was cut off while he was asleep.
In ancient Greece shaved heads were a mark of the slave. Shorn hair is
inflicted on the sick, and has been deployed by armies to both dehumanise their
own soldiers and punish their enemies. (Barkham:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/20/gender.music)

The deliberate removal of head hair is, in these instances differently
motivated and incarnated depending upon the gender of the shaved figure.
Whereas for Samson his hair represented physical strength, and its removal by
his duplicitous wife, Delilah, not only symbolizes but also causes the loss of
that strength.For the sisters in The Little Mermaid their hair represents
their sexuality, the removal of it does not, in fact, alter the mer-women
themselves (as it does Samson), only the reactions of those around them are
changed, and thus this key difference between the genders prioritizes the
impact of the male gaze upon women’s power to act, and reveals that when a
female character decides to shave her head she embodies an implicit subversion
of part of the process of becoming ‘feminine’.

The first time Crace visits the theme is in his millennial novel Being Dead, in which the disappearance
and murder of a married couple, Joseph and Celice, facilitates a ‘coming of
age’ epiphanic homecoming for their estranged daughter Syl, a troubled but
empathetic young character. Syl’s shaven
head is prioritized in early descriptions of her, and serves to stretch the
image away from the suggestion of suffering and instead suggests a bohemian vitality,
which explicitly rejects feminine chastity. Syl’s bald head functions as an
external marker of her deliberately unconventional lifestyle:

… her shaven head, her unmade bed, her disregard for everything, her
clothes, particularly her unembarrassed appetite for men.Why not take lovers, given half the chance?
Why not work through the string sections and then the brass?You can’t make mayhem when you’re dead.
(p.101)

Syl’s verve seems all the more poignant given the reader’s knowledge
that (unbeknown to her) Syl’s parents are dead, but she also forms a contrast
with her parents’ reserved dispositions.We are told on the novel’s opening page that a middle aged couple,
Joseph and Celice, (the director of the Tidal Institute and a lecturer in
natural science respectively) are already dead; they were murdered whilst
making love on a secluded part of a beach at the fictionalized Baritone Bay.
Conveyed alongside this information is the fact that although, they were
murdered in this way, the couple were actually very reserved during their
lifetime, we are told that: ‘(h)ardly any of their colleagues had ever seen
them together, or visited them at home, let alone witnessed them touch’
(p.1).As Philip Tew argues in Jim Crace (2006) ‘the intimacy of detail
of the deaths is juxtaposed with their reserve.Such contrasts are the driving forces of the novel.’ (p.134). Syl
provides another contrast with her parents’ reserve, in that she is the epitome
of a contemporary, urban young woman, sexually liberated and not at all
concerned with her parents’ scientific take on the world, Syl has eschewed any
academic career and instead works as a waitress in a bohemian restaurant next
to a concert hall.

The fact that the disappearance of her parents is the catalyst for
Syl’s homecoming enables her to function as an affirmation that although there
is no spiritual afterlife for Joseph and Celice, they live on in their
daughter, who has returned to bring life to the family home.Her entry to the house evokes the imagery of
birth: ‘The threshold of the house was swollen.The front door jammed as ever, and Syl had to show her driver where to
push to ease it open.’ (p.121) Once inside the house Syl begins a process of
taking ownership of it, beginning by resuming her role of errant teenager by
engaging in unrestrained sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, we are told:

[…] they spent
the night in her own bedroom, or at least the room that had been hers … Stress
and agitation … were unexpected aphrodisiacs … She brushed his penis with the
stubble of her hair … she took the opportunity to flood her parents house with
noise. (p.125-126)

The sequence ends,
however with Syl switching roles, symbolically inhabiting the space that her
mother used to reside in:

Syl was both
tranquil and unnerved.She left her
sleeping driver in her bed and went into her mother’s room, where she would be
more comfortable and might sleep.She
put on her mother’s nightdress and lay down on the nearside of the bed.’ (p.
127)

Syl’s bald head here (we are reminded of ‘the stubble of her hair’)
is suggestive of a ‘newborn’ status, and is thus life-affirming, as is the
flooding of the house with noise. The eventual habitation of the mother’s gown
and room by the daughter, are suggestive of an acceptance and continuation of
the family line.Syl therefore offers a
glimpse of comfort in an otherwise relentlessly bleak tale.Her vigor and her bald head enable her to
fulfill the symbolic function of providing an affirmation of life within an
atheist narrative that seeks to offer hope even though it insists on denying
the comfort of any spiritual life after death.

Kristine Stiles discusses the link between the shaven head and the
actualization of both trauma and a kind of comfort in her essay, ‘Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies:Representations From Cultures of Trauma’
(1993)she explains the symbolic
nature of the shaven head, by locating the image in its historical, social and
cultural instances thus: ‘Shaved heads is a representation that refers both to
an image and a style which result from a wide variety of social and political
experiences outside of the context of the visual arts…’ (p.20).For Stiles, as for Crace, the aftermath of
the second world war and in particular the public shaving of women who had been
accused of conducting sexual relationships with German soldiers who were known
as ‘horizontal collaborators’ provides the context for the contemporary
symbolic value of the shaven-headed woman:

Horizontal
collaborators served as metonymic signifiers for the "vertical
collaborators" who, under the Vichy government, maintained an upright
appearance while they capitulated to the Germans, raised their hands in the
Nazi salute, and welcomed "The New Europe" into their beds. These
women with shaved heads were used as communal purgatives, scapegoats for the
French who themselves had whored for jobs in Germany, for extra food, and for
peacetime amenities especially during the years 1940 to 1943. In 1944-45,
photographers like Robert Capa and Carl Mydan documented the terrible brutality
to women accused of sexual collaborations with the Germans; and Marcel Ophuls
included documents of one such incident in the town of Clermont-Ferrand in his
1969 film The Sorrow and the Pity. Female collaborators
whose crimes were not sexual were not treated with the same kind of corporeal
violations as the horizontal collaborators whose primary sedition was to have
slept with the enemy….War condones and ritualizes the destruction and
occupation of territories and bodies. Marked as properly owned by the
community, the shaved head confirms feminist's observations that wars are
fought for, among other things, privilege to the bodies of women (p.21).

In the scenario that Stiles describes the female who is subjected to
the shearing essentially occupies a subjugated metonymic position, the loss of
the hair becomes more than simply a public humiliation and more even than the
symbolic removal of the feminine allure that complied with the Nazi soldiers.
The shaven head, and by implication the woman herself becomes a visceral
representation of the shedding of a communal sin and thus causes the woman in
question to occupy a binary position in that her shaven head represents two
dichotomous positions at once; in one interpretation she stands for healing,
and thus epitomizes a kind of regenerative strength (in an almost Christ-like
sacrifice the shaven female atones and thus is given responsibility for the
‘sin’ and this allows the villagers to free themselves from any further
association with the collaboration) as well as, more straightforwardly, her shaven
head symbolizes the shame and humiliation that atoning for a sexual sin would
traditionally call for.

In Crace’s fiction the symbolism
of the shaven-headed female is extended beyond Stiles subjugated metonymic
position, such that whilst the figure undoubtedly fulfills the regenerative
functions that Stiles implies can be read into the image more generally; the
female characters themselves use their shaven heads as markers of defiance from
traditional gender roles. Even though Margaret’s head is forcibly shaved she
comes to see her baldness as a marker of independence and actively displays her
stubble to ward off unwanted advances and to distance herself from groups of
fellow travelers in order to lead an independent life which flouts traditional
gender roles.In Being Dead the shaven-headed Syl returns to her estranged parents
home after they have gone missing; the moment of Syl’s realization that
something might be amiss arises after her parents fail to answer their
phone.This episode in the novel allows
us an insight into Syl’s character, she is described using language that is deliberately
‘unfeminine’, we are told that:

[Syl] was the
sort herself not to show up, to let her colleagues down, to stay out late, to
cheat on friends and debts, to keep no one informed, to let the phone sing to
itself …She tried their mobile phone, while sat on the lavatory with the door
open, a can of Chevron beer in her hand and with her own phone, chirruping on
its extended lead, between her feet, in the cradle of her knickers.’ (p.102)

In the passage above Syl lacks self-consciousness which works
alongside her bald head as a rejection of the male gaze, but by removing
connotations of the feminine (the adult female) the image of Syl quoted above
also implicitly has connotations of the child-like, the use of the term
‘cradle’ adds to this sense, and thus this image re-instates vulnerability in
the shaven headed female. Syl’s bald head also works as a symbol of resistance
to the stifling academic, intellectual, but stagnant world of her parents, it
is listed amongst the things that her parents would disapprove of and is linked
to a sense of proactive sexual promiscuity: ‘… her shaven head, her unmade bed,
her disregard for everything, her clothes, particularly her unembarrassed
appetite for men.Why not take lovers,
given half the chance? Why not work through the string sections and then the
brass?You can’t make mayhem when you’re
dead.’ (p.101). Syl’s deliberate baldness is used here to suggest a more
general rebellion, but one that is also closely linked to her sexuality, whilst
the image of a shaven-headed male does not necessarily evoke this association.

In part this can simply be
attributed to the higher rate of occurrence of male pattern baldness when
compared to naturally occurring female baldness; but the act of the deliberate
removal of head hair, whilst it can go unnoticed in men, remains a statement
when perpetrated by or on a woman.Such
figures are often regarded as making a statement about their relationship to
traditional constructs of femininity.Crace
explains this thus: ‘there is something heroic and defeminised (in the
Hollywood sense) about shaven-headed females. Defeminised but eroticised,
perhaps.’ (interview with author 02/09/08)

Crace’s female characters are no different in this respect, indeed
it is common for reviewers of Crace’s fiction to comment upon the strength of
the female
characters that populate his novels, even though his depiction of male
characters is regarded by some as being less ‘rounded’. This is perhaps suggestive of an intention to
create female rather than male points of identification for the reader.This situation is exemplified in reviewers’
responses to Crace’s most recent novel, The Pesthouse (2007); such that whilst Gail Caldwell complained in the Boston Globe that Crace’s male characters lacked substance: ‘The
bad guys, for instance, from the rustlers to the religious reactionaries, are
faceless prototypes’[iii], Emily Barton of the Los
Angeles Times,
says of the female characters in the same novel: ‘[…] it joins the ranks of tales in which women fend for
themselves in the wilderness.’[iv].The Pesthouse is perhaps then,
recognized as being the most overtly female survivalist tale within Crace’s
body of work; it is not, however, the only time that Crace details female
survival in the wilderness.

Before he adopted the motif of the
shaven-headed woman in Being Dead (1999)
and The Pesthouse (2007), Crace
explored the theme of female endurance in his earlier writing.In several of his fictions the plight of
women is to face violence and humiliation, from which they gain both an
independence and strength. Crace’s second book The Gift of Stones (1988) details the last years of a
stone-age village, which is eventually abandoned as the villagers’ income
dwindles due to the discovery of a new metal which makes their stone craft
redundant.Of those cast into the
wilderness the village story-teller’s unnamed daughter attempts to keep the
memory of her village alive in the new Iron Age, by telling the story of her
father to the reader.Similarly, Crace’s
fifth novel Quarantine (1997) details the plights of the characters
of Miri and Marta, whose predicament, to some extent thematically foreshadows
The Pesthouse, as the two women flee
into the Judean desert in an attempt to escape Miri’s abusive husband (Musa)
and live in the desert together in order to make a new life for themselves and
Miri’s baby.

However, Crace’s female protagonists do not simply end up having to
find ways of fending for themselves.Rather,
his fiction is populated with notably and deliberately unfeminine female characters, (at least in the more conventional
sense), from the tall and inelegant character of Celice in Being Dead, who is larger and in many ways physically more
‘masculine’ than her husband Joseph, to the shaven-headed survivor, Margaret in
The Pesthouse, Crace’s female
characters continue to defy and subvert traditional constructs of
femininity.The shaven-headed female is one such image,
and can be regarded as an incarnation of Crace’s attempt to render female
characters that are imbued with a complex set of symbolic functions. This is
possible because, as noted above, the shaven-headed woman could be said to
occupy a dual symbolic position, in that the figure represents both human
frailty and a kind of de-feminized strength.

Crace’s continued interaction with the image was affirmed when he
again utilized the symbol of the shaven-headed female in his 2007 novel The Pesthouse in which Margaret is the
main protagonist.If Syl forms the
epitome of a contemporary, urban young woman, then Margaret is, at the
beginning of The Pesthouse, something
of a reversal, living in an archaic future America, without the benefits of
modern conveniences. Her village, Raft,
has turned to oppression and superstition in an attempt to survive when
resources are scarce. Tew describes Raft
in the following terms:

Thefuture is anachronistic, redolent of an
earlier pre-industrial age […] this is an age of superstition, magic and
storytelling, of the fear of fever, of ferrymentaking travelers across the river, and a constant migration
Eastward.America is in full
reversal.The plethora of details
conveys an early modern, almost quasi-medieval mixture of superstition and
naivety. (p.197)

Unlike Syl, Margaret does not choose to have her head shaved, but
rather as the suspected victim of a dreaded plague-type illness is forcibly shaved
and sent to the pesthouse (a secluded hut on a hill above the village), where,
since no medicine is available, she has to wait alone until she either recovers
or dies from her disease at a safe distance from the rest of the village.Whilst Margaret is secluded in the hilltop
hut, a landslide unearths toxic chemicals which kill every other inhabitant of
her village.Crace chooses to remind the
reader of Margaret’s shaven head at the same time that he reveals that she is
safe from the toxic vapors, thus implicitly linking the concept of the shaven-head
and survival in the reader’s mind: ‘The boulder hut on the far side of the hill,
well out of danger’s way, too high for that night’s heavy vapors, was occupied
by Margaret, the only stub haired person in the neighborhoods.’ (p.19). Once
recovered from her illness Margaret emerges into a world that is lawless and in
which, as the sole survivor of her
village, there is no one left alive that Margaret can turn to. Since her bald
head denotes illness Margaret is an outcast and, as such, has to become almost
completely self-reliant.Her shaven
head continues to act as protection, as it scares away would-be attackers, as
well as providing Margaret with independence, which she has not previously
known in her highly constrictive village life.We learn that she and her newfound companion, fellow outcast, and
subsequent survivor Franklin enjoy an equal relationship, free from the
constricting sexual politics that Margaret had previously endured; she and
Franklin share a physical intimacy from the start.We learn that they: ‘slept back to back, the
pale faced shaven woman and the younger man, in their great wooden-wheeled bed,
between the canopies of trees, like children in a fairy tale, almost floating,
almost out to sea.So, finally, some
happiness’ (p.201).

It is noteworthy that Crace chooses again to remind the reader of
Margaret’s bald head at the same time that he tells the reader that this is the
moment at which she ‘finally’ experiences ‘some happiness’ in terms of finding
herself a partner. The complex and dualistic response to the female shaven-head
of a highly patriarchal society as represented by the archaic gender politics
of the people of Crace’s fictionalized future America, serve as an analogy for
the figure’s use more generally. The shaven head often forms a short hand
symbolism of the complex emotions that the female protagonist experiences.Not least of these is a kind of sexual
freedom, in that although long hair on women forms a dominant marker of sexual
desirability; having a shaven head fulfils a niche fetishistic symbolic
function that prevents the shaven woman from escaping definition along
sexualized lines.

There is then a bifurcation of effect in the image of the shaven-headed
woman that both constrains and releases Crace’s characters at the same time.
The shaven headed woman is not without sexual appeal, but is depicted as having
escaped the need to be servile, and is instead expected to be sexually
assertive (even aggressive).This allows
the character of Syl to subvert (though not to finally escape) the position of
servile waitress in the MetroGnome restaurant where she works and to turn the
usual relationship between waitress and male patron on its head. The response
of the male customers at her café is bound up in a sexual response, but it is
one that sees Syl as the aggressor.Being
bald, Crace implies, allows Syl to subvert traditional constructs of feminine
sexuality, without giving up sex, we are told that:

Syl was a
waitress at a studio restaurant.The
MetroGnome, next to the concert hall.She was ‘the bald and brittle one’, half liked, half feared by both her colleagues
and the customers, mostly musicians. She was the sort they’d overtip, dismiss
as rude, then try to date. (p.100)

The order of
events listed above suggest that Syl has a definitive effect on the bohemian
customers, who attempt to instigate a ritual financial interaction with Syl,
only to find that this does not produce the desired result, which intensifies
their desire for her. Syl is still
constrained by a patriarchal order (she still literally waits on the men), yet by
shaving her head she has accessed a limited power to subvert the defining
parameters of what constitutes a desirable female.Simone de
Beauvoir's starting point outlined in The
Second Sex (1949) is important here:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. […]
we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then,
that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered
she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity.
(p. 267)

Beauvoir insists upon the vital role that the perception of the male
gaze plays in constructing female modesty; the subversion of the expectations
of that gaze results in Crace’s shaven-headed heroines occupying a position
that escapes the hegemonic cultural norm, but retains a sexual
disposition.Although such characters
avoid being specifically feminine in its most apparent physical manifestation,
they subvert, rather than refuse, the intentional process that Beauvoir terms
‘becoming a woman’.As Sonia Kruks notes in ‘Panopticism and Shame:

Reading Foucault
trough Beauvoir’:

Beauvoir's account of how one "becomes a
woman" requires developing an awareness of one's "permanent
visibility," learning continually to view oneself through the eyes of
the generalized (male) inspecting gaze and, in so doing, taking up as one's own
project those "constraints of power" that femininity entails. But
becoming a woman is, for Beauvoir, still an intentional process, even though it
is enacted within the constraints of power. (http://h2hobel.phl.univie.ac.at/~iaf/Labyrinth/Kruks.html)

For Margaret and Syl this process of
becoming a woman is facilitated by events out of their control, (illness or the
death of a parent respectively), but throughout the course of both novels, both
women learn to control the process to some extent.Crace reminds the reader that in purely
Darwinist terms the death of a parent represents the biological succession of
their offspring.Syl experiences a sense
of reconciliation with her dead parents that she had not enjoyed during their
lifetimes, but this is in part facilitated by her own tacit acknowledgement
that ‘Their deaths were her beginning’ (171).

Beauvoir also draws the reader’s
attention to the biblical and specifically Judeo-Christian religious origins of
the dominant version of femininity, which relies on instilling the need and the
desire to hide the female body because of its perceived inferiority to the
masculine.The
most explicit articulation of this point can be found in the New Testament:

I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ; the head of
a woman is her husband; and the head of Christ is the Father. Any man who prays
or prophesies with his head covered brings shame upon his head. Similarly, any
woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered brings shame upon her
head. It is as if she had had her head shaved. Indeed, if a woman will not wear
a veil, she ought to cut her hair. If it is shameful for a woman to have her
hair cut off or her head shaved, it is clear that she ought to wear a veil. A
man, on the other hand, ought not to cover his head, because he is the image of
God and the reflection of his glory. Woman, in turn, is the reflection of man's
glory. Man was not made from woman but woman from man. Neither was man created
for woman but woman for man. For this reason a woman ought to have a sign of
submission on her head, because of the angels. [Corinthians I, Chapter
11, 1-16.]

One way of reading Crace’s use of the image of the shaven headed
woman is as a means of attempting to subvert this process of becoming feminine
through the instigation of female body shame, whilst also removing the link
between abiding concepts of femininity and Judeo-Christian theology.As Kruks’ analysis demonstrates, there are
similarities between Foucault and Beauvoir’s concepts of the link between
becoming body consciousness and succumbing to a western, post-enlightenment,
quasi-Christian ideological structure:

Foucault reverses traditional forms of mind-body
dualism by privileging the body as the site of the formation of the self, yet
he is still caught up in this dualism. If the interiorization of power takes
place through "the body," then it can of course bypass that –
allegedly – distinct entity called "consciousness." But if, with
Beauvoir (who here draws on Merleau-Ponty) we insist that the body is not
distinct from consciousness but rather is the site of their
interconstituency, and the site of a sentient and intentional relation to the
world, then the modalities through which we interiorize and/or resist the
panoptic gaze can be explored more adequately. (http://h2hobel.phl.univie.ac.at/~iaf/Labyrinth/Kruks.html)

For the shaven
headed woman, the body, and specifically the head becomes a means of resistance,
using the head, rather than the body, also neatly sidesteps troublesome
equations between the feminine and the bodily, instead, by choosing the head as
the specific site of resistance, Crace forces his female characters to employ
an intellectual (rather than solely physical) symbolism in the ‘fight’ against
dominant Judeo-Christian ideologies of femininity.

As noted above the image of the shaven head works to some extent to
destabilize dominant Judeo-Christian ideologies concerning femininity.The figure goes further in this destabilizing
of dominant religious discourses in its role in Crace’s attempt to provide a
comforting narrative whilst insisting upon a resounding denial of the possibility
of a spiritual afterlife, since it creates a birth imagery surrounding Syl’s
entrance to her dead parents’ home and thus has connotations of birth.Similarly in the post apocalyptic world of
Raft, the image is released from its previous connotations of illness and
instead Margaret comes to symbolize newness and hope, rather than disease and
age, as Crace shifts the normal hierarchy by wiping out the rest of the world. The
shaven head in this post-apocalyptic world implies an affirmation of the life
at the moment of destruction.In both
novels the image of the shaven-headed female returning home to a place which has
been rendered lifeless, functions as a symbol of hope, which offers some sense
of comfort in novels that work very hard to maintain an atheist denial of a
spiritual afterlife.

In Crace’s Pesthouse his post-apocalyptic America
has returned to a pre-modern era, with an adjacent loss of any feminist
ideologies.As discussed above, the
female protagonist, Margaret, lives in a time in which superstition has
returned and the sexual freedom granted by technical innovations such as
contraception, as well as the protection from illness offered by advanced
medicines are no longer available. This has quickly led to a reversion to what
appears to the contemporary reader very much like fictional imaginings of a medieval
society. Fear of now incurable sexually transmitted diseases has led to an
emphasis on chastity – and because pregnancy can no longer be controlled,
female chastity is considered to be essential.As Tew notes ‘these specific ideas occasioned the novel, but they were
supplemented by retrieving notions of social formality found in more
traditional cultures, reinstating a system of barter where money has been
abandoned, and conceiving of the positive re-evaluation of woman’s virginity’
(195). It is in this setting that
Margaret lives, as a virgin Margaret has some financial value, should she get
married the dowry that her family could ask would be higher, but aged 33, her
days as a likely candidate for marriage are all but over: ‘she was, at thirty
three, she admitted to herself, a woman who might be a daughter, a sister and
an aunt, but never a wife or a mother.Her body would retain its value and remain untouched.’ (p.75). Margaret’s
eventual sexual awakening with Franklin is only possible after the disaster,
because the patriarchal order has been destroyed with the village.Margaret’s shaven head allows her to take
control of her sexual awakening as it protects her from would-be rapists who
assume that she is ill and therefore do not approach her for fear of being
infected.

For Margaretbeing shaved induces the combination of vulnerability and strength
mentioned above, her lack of head hair signifies a new found ‘straightfowardness’
and clarity of thought.The sacrifice of
female hair in Crace’s fiction also therefore lends itself to a symbolic
reading informed by Mary Louise von Franz’s hypothesis about hair and the
imagination: “The hair on the head carries the projection of unconscious
involuntary thoughts and fantasies, because these grew out of our heads”
(65-6).In Pesthouse the removal of head hair has a positive effect; we are
told that the razor removes ‘drama’ from Margaret’s head.The process of removing Margaret’s head hair
is described thus:

Her grandpa –
repeating what he’d done too recently for his son, her father – had shaved her
skull, removing all the ginger drama from her head with a shell razor, and then
called the closest women in the family, two sisters and her ma, to take off
Margaret’s body hair, snapping it out at the roots, the last of it, wherever it
might be – from her eyebrows and, most painfully, her lashes, from her
nostrils, even; from her lightly ochered forearms and her legs; elsewhere, the
hidden hair – and massage her scalp with pine tallow, until she was as shorn
and shiny as a stone and smelling like a newly readied plank.

Everybody in the land must know what
shaven baldness signified.No one could
mistake her for a safe and healthy woman now. (Pesthouse p.20)

The ceremonial imagery employed above allows Crace to operate a
short hand way of describing the community of futuristic America – archaic and
prudish, superstitious and afraid.Head
hair occupies an unusual position here in that whilst it is a dominant symbol of
female fertility and sexuality, it is not considered improper for her male
relative to shave Margaret’s head. The use of the word ‘safe’ has interesting
connotations, since as those mentioned above, Margaret often does not wish to
be viewed as ‘safe’ by the other men that she meets during her journey across
America, her bald head rescues her from attempted rape and the fear that her
baldness inspires in ‘would-be pillagers’ and attackers soon becomes an obvious
strength rather than a problem. When
Margaret does find love with Franklin the fact that her head is shaven permits
his ‘male’ urge to protect her, because Margaret is to some extent defeminised
thus removing the threat of accusations of sexism.As if to symbolize their equality as well as
to emphasize the concept of rebirth Margret shaves Franklin’s head in order to
protect him from bandits.Thus
Margaret’s actions reverse the gendered power structure that exists in the
shaving that opens the novel and establishing a sense of tabula rasa or rebirth
which both the male and female bodies can symbolize and actualize.

Within Crace’s fiction therefore head
hair and particularly the deliberate removal of head hair from a female
character functions as a short-hand means of implying or demonstrating complex
emotional or physical states for the characters themselves but also more widely
the image can reflect a dualistic set of responses or emotions that the reader
will also share, such that the figure externalizes strength and a comforting
sense of regeneration at the same time that it represents torment or
trauma.But perhaps the most striking
aspect to Crace’s incarnation of the shaven-headed female is the space that the
shaven female can occupy in terms of a subversion of the power of the wider
cultural sense of the male gaze.Both
Margaret and Syl reject the hegemonic incarnations of female bodies as outlined
by Beauvoir and instead enjoy a degree of autonomy and sexual freedom that is
implicitly linked within the texts to their shaven status.

[i] Perhaps the most famous example being the portrayal of the inmates
of Plaszow forced labor camp as depicted in Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), but see also Frank
Launder’s 2000 Women (1944), Peter
Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar (1999), Jon
Avnet’s Uprising (2001), Roman
Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), Dana
Vávrová and Joseph Vilsmaier’s Der Letzte
Zug (aka "The Last Train")
(2006) and Mark Herman’s The Boy in the
Striped Pyjamas (2008).

[ii] Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949)
sets out a feminist existentialism which is based on Sartre's precept that
existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her
analysis focuses on the Hegelian concept of the Other.